(~6 minutes to read)
Hands up who’s feeling there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Everyone? I thought so.
Okay – hands up who has more than one hobby, or whose children have more than one evening activity.
Everyone? I thought so.
Hands up who doesn’t want to give any of those pursuits up because they help bring balance to your life or your kids’ lives?
Uh-huh.
Pastime
pastime /ˈpɑːstʌɪm/ n. 1 A pleasant recreation or hobby. 2 A sport or game. [PASS1 + TIME]
Pastimes are so named because many of them started off as ways to pass the time between the end of the day’s work commitments and bedtime. I boldly state that, even though I haven’t read any authoritative article on it, because I cannot conceive of another explanation for the word’s adoption. Feel free to comment below if you know differently.
Quilting, hockey, Irish dance, reading, soccer, fencing, scouts, jigsaw puzzles, video games, painting, writing poetry, chess, playing musical instruments, knitting, football, gymnastics, scrabble, letter writing, amateur/community theatre – these and thousands of other hobbies and sports are pastimes unless you’re being paid to participate in them. Before anyone takes me to task, I will happily acknowledge that many of them provide physical exertion (much needed in a largely sedentary lifestyle) and many of them provide mental diversion (much needed in our results-focused society). The goals of many of them are rewarding too – a family heirloom in the making (i.e. a quilt), an enjoyable evening’s entertainment for an audience, or the pleasure and pride of having proved oneself in some form of competition.
Stealtime
However, a very large number of people (of which I’m one) fill their lives up so full with hobbies, sports, community volunteering and so on that their diaries become completely bloated with pastime-related commitments. They (okay – we) then have to juggle these commitments with each other and with the realities of life such as work, homemaking, home maintenance and home administration. And at that stage, the activities have become stealtimes rather than pastimes.
Activities that came about in order to pass time pleasantly have become burdensome. It becomes impossible, for example, to organize a gathering of family or friends within a month or so because everyone’s diaries are full of other commitments. Even great-aunt Muriel can’t make time for you until the second Friday of next month, and that date’s free only because her book club is taking a week off while some of its members climb Kilimanjaro (and the only reason she’s not going herself is that she doesn’t like flying).
Other Reasons for Pastimes
There are many reasons a person would take up a hobby, or a sport or other recreational activity, other than to pass the time. Here are a few: to keep fit; to indulge in something you enjoy but couldn’t earn a living at; to mix with other people who share your interests; to help others realize some sort of ambition by helping in the background; to encourage your neighbourhood/town to function as a community.
I’m currently involved in the Scouting movement (as a Cub Scout Leader), in a community/amateur theatre group (in many ways), and in a band that practises and plays quite infrequently. Until recently, I was also involved in my town’s Planning Commission, and in a citizen group that was advocating new facilities for the arts and culture. In addition, I’m someone that has trouble with the “n” word (that’s “no”), so I find myself being roped into all sorts of other volunteer activities.
Crammed Diary
The result of having all these pastimes, combined with running my own business, makes it difficult to fit anything else in (unless it’s a favour for someone, which strangely I frequently manage to do!). For example, if the band tries to arrange a rehearsal, I can’t make it Mondays because it’s Cubs, and oh – Tuesday might be a Theatre Group board meeting, and Wednesday… you get the idea. At least three other members of the band have similarly full diaries, so it doesn’t take much imagination to realize why we don’t rehearse very often, which in turn provides the answer to the question “why don’t you perform very often?”
Stress
The point of all the foregoing is that those activities which are meant to be “pleasant recreation or hobbies” often become sources of stress, and not of the healthy variety.
I realize that I’m either over-committed or totally inefficient at getting things done (or both), and I know I’m not alone. I keep on threatening to give stuff up. In fact I already have, yet nature abhors a vacuum, so the time gets committed elsewhere. And I still don’t have enough time, for example, to improve my writing to the point that I’m happy with it, or to put my winter tires on my car before the first nasty snowstorm blows in. As far as Cub Scouts is concerned, I’ve been saying “just one more year” for over seven years; it’s become expected, and doesn’t even get a laugh or smile any more. I’m pretty sure the cubs will be singing “Tom the Toad” at my funeral at this rate.
The problem is that many of our pastimes have deadlines attached to them. Deadlines are good because they reduce procrastination, but to a certain extent, they’re arbitrary – artificial. Crops won’t fail, medicine won’t be left undelivered, houses won’t burn down if I don’t get our theatre group’s playbill to the printers by next Tuesday. The printer might have to put a rush on the job, or theatre patrons might have to go without the program for the first night, but ships won’t sink, hospitals won’t cease to function, and water won’t stop flowing out of our taps. But timely readiness of the program is expected, so I stress out.
What’s the Answer?
Hmmm… I’m sure there are lots of people out there making tons of money telling people how they can make their “pastime” activities more conducive to a stress-free lifestyle. (If there aren’t, then maybe that’s something I should get onto!)
With all these labour-saving devices we have, we should have stacks of spare time. With few exceptions we don’t have to wash clothes by hand, or iron everything, or make all our meals from scratch from vegetables we’ve grown ourselves (although we may choose to, as a hobby); we don’t have to take the carpets outside and beat the living daylights out of them; we don’t need to spend the day under our car getting it working well enough to get us to work on Monday (although we may choose to, as a hobby).
So where is all that spare time?
The answers to that question and the bigger one of how to organize and control one’s “spare time” activities are, I feel sure, much more complex than a 1200 word article could address. Certainly no light bulbs have turned on as a result of me writing this.
And honestly, I don’t have enough time to think about it.
Your Turn
Is your life overflowing with “pastime” activities, or have you got life under control? Share your stories and your solutions (if you have any!) by leaving a comment.